


Home

by dem_hips



Category: Mother 2: Gyiyg no Gyakushuu | EarthBound
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-23
Updated: 2013-08-23
Packaged: 2017-12-24 10:14:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/938754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dem_hips/pseuds/dem_hips
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you're traveling and saving the world, what does "home" mean?</p><p>Inspired by http://thebaldingone.deviantart.com/art/Roche-Abbey-264683368 .</p>
            </blockquote>





	Home

People tell you it’s absurd to think you can remember things that happened when you were three.  They tell you it’s absurd to think you can remember this building when it was still in its infancy, much like you were.  But at this point, you think what other people find absurd and what you find absurd are so different you might as well be using separate terms.

Anyway, you remember it.

You remember it being cold, colder than usual, the snow clinging to the half-formed rafters and half-raised beams frozen in time.  As you stand before it, for a moment, all is silence.  Then the wind whips through glassless windows and ice shudders but does not crack, and you remember a voice--not your father’s, but another unfamiliar one--telling you the name of this place.  You store that information away for later, and just call it home.

The voice says no, the lab is still your home.  This is just temporary.  Just until the doctor makes his big discovery, and the radiation levels in the place die down.

But, you think, this home with all its unfinished promise, and that home with its stale blank faces, should probably be referred to with separate terms.

* * *

* * *

I swallow, hard, the chill dry wind stealing the breath out of my lungs.  The sun has never been strong here, but now it’s as if it’s given up on this place, with its cheerless, barren landscape.

_In the future, all is devastation._

When I step forward, the ice refuses to crack beneath my boots.  Even the snow crunches begrudgingly.  My entire body feels absent, numb, as if it’s been stolen away with the rest of them.  Maybe that’s what happened--we failed to engage the Cosmic Destroyer, and with a single sweep of its corrosive hand it wiped what it had not stolen from the world without a second thought, slowly devouring our world as its next meal and then moving on, on, on.

It’s absurd that I can’t seem to remember.

Snow Wood is in pieces, and unfortunately they’re large ones.  The reminders stand tall, each echoing with voices of people, of students, the people it stole from me.  The gate’s been ripped away, but behind a half crumbling wall I can still see the remains of Maxwell’s lab.  The wide-strewn rubble seems to form a smiling, sleep-deprived face, a helpfully offered hand.  The dorms have collapsed into the common room, though the window frames still stand like a stage facade.  Excited whispers of Tessie and Stonehenge and UFOs echo in the spirals of swirling winds, and it curdles blood I don’t have anymore, remembering them languishing beneath that same stone circle, deprived of energy and speech and life by the very beings they’d hoped one day to discover.

As I step beyond the ghost of the gate ( _and remember the cold feel of it beneath quickly-numbing fingers, refuting its boundaries for the first time in ten years, and without his help I never could have made it over_ ) my hand brushes the frozen stone, the barrier through which I last heard his numb-lipped voice.

_Well...I’ll say goodbye for now.  I don’t know where you’re going or why, but remember, we are best friends forever._

Fingers frozen to stone, I fall to my knees and bow my head.  A hand as cold and hard as the one that had taken him finds my heart somewhere in my absent chest and grips it tight, squeezing, pulsing, taking me as it had taken them.

* * *

Jeff awoke with a gasp, his panting woven into the ever-present blips and soft beeps and ticks surrounding them.  The blurry gray darkness, punctuated with tiny spots of fuzzy color, resolved itself as he groped for his glasses and slipped them on, looking around desperately.  In the faint, eternal blue glow of Dr. Andonuts’s--his father’s--lab, he remembered he was on the floor of the second story covered with fire blankets they’d scavenged from a cabinet.  Beside him, beneath the insufficient cover, Ness and Paula were clinging to each other for warmth in sleep, and even Poo had succumbed to what little comfort from the cold his blanket could offer, asleep at the top of the stairs.

As his heart rate slowed, Jeff smiled fondly at them and rose, careful not to disturb his friends as he moved to the window, wrapping his own blanket tighter around his shoulders.  Somewhere to the north, obscured by distance and trees and the natural curve of the planet, was that same building from his dreams, except that it was still whole, still standing.  He had to believe that.

He had to, because closer still, just visible above the bend of trees, Stonehenge stood stark and pale in the moonlight, marking the location where surely...surely he was being held.

He had to believe that, too, as he peered out into the frozen twilight.  He had to believe that Tony was still alive, that he was down there, waiting to be rescued--and that when he was, he’d have a home to return to.

* * *

* * *

Snow Wood was in pieces, but for now they were large ones.  In time, the bricks would come down, chunk by chunk, layer by layer.  Just for now, the gate had been torn up and transferred elsewhere, the windows removed and boarded up, the front door already pulled off its hinges. Most of it still stood, but the place that had been his home for ten years and then four more afterwards, the place that had sheltered him and fed him and taught him would soon be gone for good.

But the memories from within would not haunt those grounds like specters in a graveyard.  They had already left this place, held delicately in the professors who had already cleared out their classrooms, the students who had already emptied their dorms.  The memories were there now between their hands, held tight in each other’s to stave off the numbing cold.  Jeff turned away from the building’s growing entropy, his shy smile partly obscured by a white puff of breath.  Tony chuckled and smiled back, squeezing his hand, pressing those memories deep into his skin, into his blood, into his consciousness, and it was absurd how little it bothered him that the building was being torn down.  But they had packed up what had belonged to them, and that was all their old home owed them.

Slinging his arm now around Jeff’s shoulders, Tony pressed a kiss to his temple and turned them about, headed south towards the shore.  With warmth flooding him from that single spot, Jeff kept up, and with matching pace walked with him towards their new home.  It didn’t need another name.  Home was where he rested his head and where his loved ones slept nearby, curled up and safe and warm.  Whether it sat tall and sturdy and huddled in trees or whether he took it with him from place to place, clutched in his grasp--home was home, always.

**Author's Note:**

> My dear friend [Sam](http://discordantkettle.tumblr.com) drew the beautiful sketch of Jeff in the second section, because she is an enormous sweetheart <3


End file.
